Take what you are about to read in the context of my favorite saying;
‘’If you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem’'
Hmmmmm where to start…………..
Consider this hypothetical situation. You are walking through the streets of the town where you live, suddenly you turn a corner and come across someone you don’t know. This person is loud and offensive; he is openly homophobic, possibly xenophobic and defiantly racist toward the Muslim community. He stands on the corner, addressing any one who passes with his own very special brand of hate. Gathered around him is a group of people all of whom are ‘egging him on’, some are whole heartedly agreeing with him, some join in the banter and some agree with him ‘’light heartedly’’. Then you notice two or three people in the crowd who are friends of yours. These friends are people you have known for a while and whose company you enjoy. You have conversed with them about paintings, or poems, and other such topics and suddenly, here they are, apparently agreeing with behavior and attitudes you find abhorrent.
What do you do??
Do you confront your friends?
Do you confront the speaker?
Will you continue to be friends with these people in the future?
If you believe as I do that injustice needs to be confronted, that not to confront injustice amounts to condoning and encouraging it, how then can you NOT speak out?
As I said at the beginning, this is a hypothetical situation with hypothetical questions, and hypothetical questions don’t have any definite answers……….how can we know??
But I THINK I would confront the speaker AND my friends. Judging by the way I have reacted to real (as opposed to hypothetical) situations in the past, I think I would find it very difficult to maintain the same relationship with these friends as I had before this incident.
Which brings me to the point of this seemingly pointless ramble.
The point is……………. This is more or less what happened to me yesterday, not out there in ‘real life’ but right here in Multiply. I was happily wandering around, reading bits and pieces of different things, (the equivalent of window shopping in a ‘real’ street), when I happened across something I found pretty offensive. And there in the comments boxes were some of my friends, gleefully joining in the banter, apparently condoning what was being said!!!
Did I leave a comment? No, I slipped away and said nothing.
Did I delete these ‘’friends’’? No, I had a conversation with a couple of them and decided to leave them on my friends list.
Was I wrong not to make a stand about this? I have no idea.
Does this mean online relationships operate on completely different ‘rules’ to ‘real life’ relationships? I didn’t think so, now I’m not so sure.
Or possibly I just think too much and am blowing this whole thing way out of proportion. Or perhaps this is a prime example of how we operate in different ways in our ‘virtual’ worlds of social networking etc to the way we operate in our ‘real’ world. The only thing I know for sure is that the whole incident has left a lot of questions in my mind and whole lot of thinking material.
Ps…………if we have already discussed this, it’s not personal, it’s just the ramblings of my mind late at night.
